Palestinian Premier Says New Government Lacks Power in Gaza

Rami Hamdallah, who has been prime minister for a year, said he was dissatisfied with his new cabinet, which was selected through negotiations between the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas.Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian Authority has had a new government for 10 days now, but the prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, acknowledged on Thursday that he still lacked any authority in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and that nothing had yet changed on the ground.

Though the new government was approved by both of the rival Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, Mr. Hamdallah offered no plan for disarming militants, integrating the two sides’ security forces, or even getting Gaza’s 1.7 million residents to start paying taxes and electricity bills.

In an hourlong interview, Mr. Hamdallah laid much of the responsibility for reconciling the West Bank and Gaza after seven years of schism on two committees, one of which has yet to be formed. He repeated political platitudes about Palestinian unity, but offered no practical program to deliver it.

Mr. Hamdallah, who has been prime minister for a year, said he was dissatisfied with his new cabinet, which was selected through negotiations between the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that has ruled Gaza since 2007. If the decision had been left up to him, he said, he would have chosen “very few” of the ministers in the new cabinet.

“You have to be realistic — we’re not in control,” said Mr. Hamdallah, 55, a former university president. He noted that German reunification started a quarter-century ago, and that “up until now, they are still working on that, so don’t expect we’ll do it all in 24 hours.”

The new government has already weathered one crisis, a dispute over the payment of public-sector salaries in which the Hamas-affiliated police in Gaza shut the territory’s banks for a week and even confiscated credit-card readers from some supermarkets. But Mr. Hamdallah said it was public pressure in Gaza and the intervention of a monetary official that got the banks reopened, not him or his ministers.

There is no plan to avoid a similar clash next month. Mr. Hamdallah said that the Palestinian Authority would not pay the 40,000 employees of the former Hamas government in Gaza, and that it had not secured a commitment from Qatar or other countries to do so.

Palestinian analysts gave the new government poor opening grades and said that part of the blame belonged to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the authority and leader of Fatah. The reconciliation agreement does leave the work of integrating the two factions’ employees in Gaza to a committee, the analysts said, but Mr. Hamdallah could have acted to consolidate the civil services at the top, replacing Hamas deputy ministers in Gaza with his own people.

Instead, “he left a vacuum,” said Khalil Shikaki, a pollster and political expert based in Ramallah. “He’s not taking ownership; it’s as simple as that. He has been given a mandate: The president said, ‘You are prime minister.’ He should be acting like one.”

“He seems not to know what to do,” Mr. Shikaki added. “It’s like he has to walk on eggs and make sure he doesn’t break any of them, because he might then be accused of being the person who blew up the reconciliation deal.”

The new government, created under an agreement signed in Gaza on April 23 between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, is supposed to rule for at least six months, until long-overdue national and legislative elections are held. Its 17 ministers are independent professionals unaffiliated with any political party, and both Mr. Hamdallah and Mr. Abbas have promised that it will adhere to international demands that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and honor previous agreements, all steps that Hamas continues to reject.

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The United States and other nations that consider Hamas a terrorist organization have said they will continue to finance the new government but monitor it closely to guard against Hamas influence. Israel, which halted peace talks with the Palestinians after the agreement was signed in April, has shunned the new government as “backed by Hamas” and decided not to allow its ministers to travel routinely between the West Bank and Gaza through its territory. On Thursday, the four ministers who live in Gaza were belatedly sworn in via video conference.

Samah Sabawi, a Palestinian poet and political activist who lives in Australia but has many relatives in Gaza, said the bank crisis showed a “lack of trust on the ground between the two factions.”

“If it’s a normal democracy in a sovereign nation, you can have diverse views with conflicting agendas,” Ms. Sabawi said. “But we’re talking about a people under occupation. Their politics, their policies, are always beholden to whomever is paying their money. It really has been reduced to just theater.”

In Gaza, the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, stepped aside, but his picture still hangs in government offices. The streets are patrolled by Hamas forces. A rocket was fired Wednesday into Israeli territory. The Rafah border crossing into Egypt remains closed, and Mr. Hamdallah said negotiations with Egypt to reopen it had not begun.

“I wish I could open it yesterday,” he said, “but this is not in our hands.”

Mr. Hamdallah said his cabinet had appointed a five-member committee on Tuesday to tackle administrative, financial and legal issues surrounding integration. One task is to reverse a decree Mr. Abbas signed years ago exempting Gazans from taxes and other payments because Hamas had taken over there.

“We will be asking people to pay their electricity bills,” he said, but added, “We’re not going to do it tomorrow.”

Security issues, including disarming Hamas’s military wing and other groups, will be left for a high commission that Mr. Abbas has yet to name, Mr. Hamdallah said.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, said Mr. Abbas was now responsible for what happened in Gaza. “There is a specific Palestinian commitment to disarm terrorist groups, and it is clear that this hasn’t happened,” Mr. Regev said. “They cannot have it both ways. They have either formed a unity government with Hamas or they haven’t.”

Mr. Hamdallah, for his part, has emphasized Gaza’s problems while collecting congratulations from 50 diplomats. On Thursday, he started with a medical conference at the Ministry of Health, met with a United Nations delegation dealing with desert issues and received a gift from the Swedish consul general, and he was headed to a Russian festival and a meeting with West Bank police chiefs.

“The burden has increased,” said Mr. Hamdallah, a button-down civil servant who commutes more than an hour each way from his home in Tulkarm, and wore a tiny Palestinian flag pin on the lapel of his dark blue suit. “We have really a lot of responsibilities on our shoulders.”

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on June 13, 2014, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Palestinian Premier Says New Government Lacks Power in Gaza. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe